The bonds formed between two people when fate brings them together are
currently under scrutiny at the Blue Heron Arts Center, where
French-Canadian playwright Anne Legault's new play, Alma and Mrs. Woolf,
just opened. Intriguing and attractively presented, this is a play that
demonstrates how beauty can, in fact, be only skin deep.

Legault - whose work was translated by Daniel Libman - has presented a
fictional account of what might have happened in 1935 had literary figure
Virginia Woolf been trapped in a library reading room (represented here with
Roman Tatarowicz oppressive, yet warm, tall wooden panels) with Canadian
musical prodigy Alma Rattenbury. Rattenbury was tried for murdering her
husband, but acquitted, while Woolf's inner demons are slowly consuming her
from the inside out. Though each is foreign in the other's world, they must
fill the time until they're discovered somehow, and talking seems the best
way.

Rattenbury does a lot of the talking, most likely because her story is less
familiar to modern audiences than Woolf's. She tells of her abusive mother,
her failed marriages, and the eventual tryst with an employee that found her
husband dead and her lover sentenced to death. As gracefully portrayed by
Nicole Orth-Pallavicini, Alma's actions do all make a sort of convoluted
sense, as if different movements in a musical composition.

While Alma gets one truly bone-chilling moment - the vivid description of
how she murdered a woman by playing the piano - Woolf (Joan Grant) doesn't
come across so well. Though Grant possesses a rich, colorful voice that
reeks of upper-crust English diffidence, it's never given a chance to be
fully utilized. While she occasionally delves lightly into her own troubled
past (sexual abuse and the like) and her present difficult life, she most
frequently is limited to brief interjections in Alma's story.

Equally demonstrative of Legault's desire to give her characters more to say
than perhaps they could find naturally, she has given each a number of
internal monologues that do less to reveal the characters' inner natures
than to give each a moment alone in the spotlight. Director Jim Pelegano
handles these elements as well as can be expected - and keeps everything
else well polished - but he can't overcome the problem that these moments
prevent character development and illumination from happening through
interaction.

It's more ironic still that the one time Legault really lets us see what
makes these women tick is during the lengthy discussion about death covered
by the last quarter or so of the play. If less dramatically acute than
outright spooky, there is a real give and take here, a sense of both women
putting their true feelings out in the open for the other to ponder,
manipulate, and comment upon, and this is a welcome change from the overlong
monologues and breathless expository nature of so much that came before.

Yet, both performers are highly ingratiating and committed to their
characters, so getting to that point and accepting it when it arrives is far
from difficult. This also makes it hard not to feel some affection for Alma
and Mrs. Woolf itself, even if the light of truth shines mostly brightly
only when the play and its characters are at their very darkest.